This is the actual basis of my voice recording to know the exact tone and what’s not.That note is actually from Francis (my employer), helping me walkthrough this activity.

Audio Recording Experience

I had this experience wherein I was tasked to conduct an audio recording that should be spontaneous in regards to my feedback on various posts found in the website Ideal-Helper. The purpose of this activity was to see if I could express my thoughts and express whatever I feel during that moment. Here are my thoughts on my very first—yes, you read it right—first audio experience.

Breaking out of the Shell

Prior to this audio recording stint, I actually had this uncomfortable feeling whenever I am recording my own voice. It may be just I am conscious of the act itself. It actually took me three tries for the first of the three recordings to be somewhat audible for me. In the first two salvos, my voice was so soft that I can’t understand what I was saying.

On the third try, I was more at ease and recorded my thoughts as if I was just talking to a friend; which was like I was having a friendly conversation (and the reason for this task). Then everything was just spontaneous and free-flowing. The flow was really so natural 🙂

A confidence-boosting Experience

The whole process went a smooth as silk. All three recordings were conducted and done as the task intended me to do. I soon got the hang of it and I am now eager to do more of this kind of activity. I now felt that there’s no difference in having a conversation and recording my thoughts as I speak. This activity gave a boost to my confidence in terms of speaking then listening to my own voice though audio recording.

I consider this experience a highlight of my job as a virtual assistant. I can definitely say that being a virtual assistant does not only rely on creative and writing skills. The ability to express my thoughts through speech brings a new dimension to the job title.

This kind of activity is highly recommended for virtual assistants and their employers to try. This is also a form of communication that will hasten and give ease to the communication process.

This works well for your personal productivity. Independent of what you do, if you use the computer, you can either waste your time or get something done.

If you know that you want to relax, then you can disable rescuetime for this time. Or, just keep it running without stressing yourself.

If you know you want to get something done and don’t want to distract yourself, use rescuetime’s ability to measure your productivity to increase the amount of work you get done in a day.

And if you want to guide and coach your virtual assistant, or simply want to know what he does in the time you pay him – use this free software as well:

You can review which tasks take him more time than you would have anticipated. You can keep tab of what distracts him.

This way, you can give him feedback accordingly. And don’t forget to compliment your VA if his productivity score by far exceeds yours! 🙂

Think about it:

One proven way to monitor and keep your assistant effective is to review screenshots of his work recorded by a time-tracker software. Examples for these software are Hubstaff and the Odesk time tracker application.

But there are downsides of using this method. You need to personally review the screenshots. If you are detail-oriented and/or curious, you will tend to do that daily.

That’s what was happening to me. Although I get lots of impressions of the work of my virtual assistants this way, it also takes a considerable bunch of time out of my busy schedule.

(Note that using this software is already 100% more effective than just reviewing the work output or relying on email communication back and forth to check on your assistants! I just want you to save even more time.)

If you have established a baseline of trust with your virtual assistant using screen recording sofware of their work, then it’s time to speed up your review of your VA’s productivity.

(Just still keep the screenshot recording sofware running in the background to double check from time to time.)

If you use rescuetime (additionally) with your VA’s, you can simply check their productivity scores once a week.

That’s lots of time saved in the long run!

It gets even better: if you have a team of VAs working for you, then you can even use rescuetime to compare their productivity levels.

Some healthy competition is always working to bring the best out of your Virtual Assistants. Just don’t increase pressure until it is conceived as stress. This will be counter intuitive.

Also, this method may not work for all types of VAs. Creative tasks like graphics or design tasks may need their time.

But the more “mechanical” the outsourced task gets, the better using software for productivity helps.

Opinions? Would you use this software yourself? And if no, why not?

Comments for Awareness of your productivity inceases just by keeping a program running in the background

Nov 06, 2014

Disciplined and Motivatedby: Francis This may not be effective most of the time, but, if the person is disciplined and motivated to work, then there will be no room for procrastination.

If you work alone esp virtual workers like me, there’s plenty of room for procrastination. But if you are truly determined to do your job~~no app can measure that =)

We asked each freelancer participant in the case study for interview answers to a set of good questions for virtual assistants. Look around to get a glimpse into the lives of VA’s from all around the world!

Why is an email list important?

As you “capture” interested people in your email list, you can start building a relationship with them. This way, it will be most effective when you really want to recommend a product to them.

Having a responsive, growing list is crucial for your success.

Getting traffic to your websites is the first step for building your list.

How a Virtual Assistant can help you with tasks within your email marketing service

I tested different email delivery services and without question, Aweber is the best one. It has extensive training materials available. This makes it very easy even for an inexperienced (and possibly lower cost) Virtual Assistant to get trained without much effort from the side of you, the employer.

Some tasks that are time consuming that can be effectively outsourced to a VA:

Set up emails from a word file in the Aweber interface. Especially if you use advanced designs, colors etc

Moving email autoresponders that you have set up in the past with the classic autoresponder to the more flexible and modern campaign builder. This can be very time consuming to do on your own if you have long autoresponders or many lists

Setting up lists if you segment your audience. This means that you send one set of messages to visitors interested in one aspect of your business and another one to other groups of your visitors. This allows for much better conversion rates.

Your VA can review reports, analytics from the Aweber interface and point out actionable informations for you, so that you don’t have to review the analytics yourself. Checking on analytics daily is a very pointless and ineffective, but easy to fall in time consuming activity. Just leave it to your VA who will focus on just the right things.

Put to work an email list building ebook with a VA

Your email list building efforts should all start with a comprehensive list building blueprint.

The overall blueprint involves a lot of work. Just to be honest with you.

The work needed for these strategies to work is more time consuming than hard, actually. And that’s exactly the right moment to leverage your time using outsourcing.

You can turn the hard work into more easy list building by getting one trustworthy Virtual Assistant to help you.

What are some steps to start?

If you don’t stay focused and jump right in, you risk losing lots of time and even money, as these services try really hard to upgrade you from free to paying members!

Three proven services that work

Here are three services (from a choice of many dozen services – don’t get sucked into it too fast!) that you can check out to generate quite a bit of traffic.

Inform yourself about the email service Viralinbox to keep the emails in your personal email account manageable. This is especially useful when you start using multiple viral list builders!

Protect all your “viral affiliate links” that you will use in this email list building project with ViralURL.

Ready to effectively generate traffic? To start, I recommend the State-of-the-Art-Mailer (SOTAM) from personal experience (including a free ebook with step-by-step instructions!).

No need to do all at once (even if all these services will try to convince you to sign up everywhere).

Stay calm and focused, and work with your VA on each service until you get the traffic and results you need. Don’t invest any money (except in your assistant, of course), before you don’t see any subscriptions.

Summary:

Outsourcing itself requires a lot of time investment. If you need something to get done by tomorrow, outsourcing might not be a good solution of your problem.

Communication is the most important factor of efficient outsourcing, not only from your assistants, but from you as well.

Most of the assistants prefer an hourly rate rather than working on a fixed price job.

Start of the Interview:

Francis:

I do agree that outsourcing is not the solution of your choice if you have tight time schedule. If you have a work that needs to be done until tomorrow, you shouldn’t outsource it.

It takes longer for someone to hire someone and train him than to do the work yourself if it’s a task which is to do within a few days.

If it’s a long term project which you have a little control over, for example, write an e-product sell it and you have a few months for that.

Then, I think, outsourcing is still a viable solution for as long as you are disciplined and quick with screening for the right assistant.

So you tell me that you need to fire people all the time, I think such an example is an extreme example. It shouldn’t happen more than two or three times.

Stefan:

Okay.

Francis:

If it happens very often then we have a problem on a different level. If the communication is clear – the expectations is clear – I mean, there can be a misunderstanding one or two times.

The first assistant is not skilled enough, the second assistant is not motivated enough. And after those two feedback loops, your risk should be very small that an assistant is neither skilled enough nor patient enough to do your job.

If this still happens then you need to work on your communication skills, in my opinion. I propose to you if you have the next job description, whenever this is, you can work together with me and we increase the quality of your job description. And I propose some help with the interview process.

Stefan:

Alright. Okay.

Francis:

That would be my proposition.

Stefan:

Yes, we can do that.

Francis:

Okay. I think this whole trust building exercise is a prerequisite before we can continue to work.

So Stefan, let’s assume that we have started out with a good job description and we have found a good quality candidate with a high level of motivation and skill for the right price.

There has been a little bit of trust building in the first week where you work together. He delivers good work results in the first week and is happy with the payment

Stefan:

Yes.

Francis:

The payment guarantee comes from oDesk. As long as he works within the guidelines in an hourly contract, he will automatically be paid.

Stefan:

You’re talking about hourly based.

Francis:

That is correct.

Stefan:

And why not fixed price? You wouldn’t recommend a fixed price at all?

Francis:

I have had a sub-section in my site where I discussed fixed price versus hourly pay. The bottom-line is fixed price is much more interesting to many assistants. All assistants I’ve asked prefer hourly pay because with fixed price, there is a risk. We tell them, “After you done the job, I pay you $20.” You have the freedom within the oDesk guidelines to not pay them because you say you are not happy.

So if this happens then the virtual assistant has no money. In other words, the risk is with his side. So he will often not be motivated to do the job. With the hourly pay, he will always be paid as long as he, for example, doesn’t surf on Facebook all the time and you end the contract because of that.

Stefan:

Well, what I don’t like about hourly pay that’s why I changed that a little bit in the past from hourly paid to, what I used in the last time, fixed price is that in the end I have absolutely no guarantee that I would have a result at all. I could pay hundreds or thousands of dollars and have nothing in the end. That is totally my risk.

GET FREE OUTSOURCING COACHING

Hey I am Francis!

Nice to meet you, I am the person behind this website! The employer of virtual assistants, website owner, chemist and optimist.

My main goal is to teach you to outsource your work to others - so that you can enjoy your new free time like this.

Do you believe in building bridges between different people based on mutual trust and respect? Do you think doing this will allow both sides to draw the maximum from each other, and reach a win win situation? Where you win, and the other person - like a virtual assistant -also wins? If you do believe this, like I do, I think we should meet :)